Ever since I started using computers, I've been baffled by the relative clumsiness of installing applications. Whether we are talking the really old days (launching the Rambo game off a tape), the '90s (running Keen or using installers in Windows 95), or the modern days (still those installers, but now also package management and self-contained applications); it's all relatively cumbersome, and they all have their downsides. I decided to put my money where my mouth is, and come up with my idealistic, utopian method of installing, running, updating, and uninstalling applications.

It looks somewhat similar, but Gobolinux is an attempt to achieve modularity within the typical GNU/Linux paradigm, where there's no distinction between the base system and the applications, that is, any package can depend on other packages that may or may not be present, and it can fullfill the requirements of yet other packages.

On the other hand, Thom's proposal assumes a base system, which makes it more like PC-BSD or Mac OS X. Once you have a system/applications distinction, package management is almost trivial. But then all distros would have to agree on one base system, which would either kill the well-known configurability of GNU/Linux (as in being able to have a very small installation) or be such a small system that lots of duplicated libraries would coexist, among other problems. The LSB guys have been trying to do just that for years, and I don't know how much success the've had, but the fact is that third-party program packages are still distro-specific. TANSTAAFL :p

No, it's an elaboration on MacOS X. The system bundle is presumed to provide a generous set of shared libraries and prolonged ABI stability -- no small feat.

As with MacOS, any library excluded from the stable system bundle must be statically linked into all dependent program bundles, each of which may contain a different outdated version of the library.

The main differences from MacOS are the semantic filesystem and the bundle repository, along with the minor hierarchy change. It wouldn't be difficult to prototype this system for OS X using Spotlight or perhaps Nepomuk.

I have one question for Thom: I assume the desktop environment would be part of the system bundle so that its libraries could be shared amongst program bundles. So where on the filesystem would the per-user settings for such system components live? For example, does my wallpaper belong in /Settings/butters/System or /System/Settings/butters?